The integration of the 'Vertriebene' from Eastern Germany certainly gets invoked these days by the Refugees Welcome crowd. I've heard Germans my age say things like "When my grandmother came to Frankfurt as a refugee in 1945 she was welcomed, so we owe the same welcome to migrants today ..." And of course it would be indelicate to respond that a trainload of Prussian women and a boatload of African men are not quite the same thing, where integrating into western Germany is concerned.
This was certainly a fascinating article to read. I have certainly read about the desolation and chaos of much of post-war Europe before but you have provided a lot of interesting details I don't believe I have seen before.
For example, I haven't read about how early many Western Germans were of the ethnic German and Prussian arrivals from the East and a wariness that they might be a permanent authoritarian influence in the future. The profound role of Prussia in founding the modern unified German nation and the fact that it was completely erased from the map after the war with the former residents becoming new leading citizens in the rest of the country makes one wonder what would happen if something similar happened elsewhere.
The notion that the Russians were less inclined to view ordinary Germans as complicit in evil would certainly have interesting effects downstream. I took an elective course showing how West and East Germany were very different in how they retrospectively looked at the atrocities of Nazism. The East Germans were told that all previous conflicts were forgotten and forgiven as now we have socialism. West Germans, particularly starting in the 1960s, contrasty engaged in massive soul searching about previous atrocities.
"In November 1945 three American soldiers went to a football stadium in uniform and no one bothered them." Sadly I think George Bush thought that it would be like this in Iraq after the Iraq war.
"These eastern Jews actually looked like the alien caricatures Nazi propaganda had bombarded them with, dressed in oriental clothes from the shtetl, totally unlike the assimilated German Jews they had grown up with. "
That is the weird thing about the holocaust German Jews were integrated and actually paid a vital role in WWI - they were a great benefit.
I do wonder if Hitler had not been in hospital at the end of WWI he might have realised that they weren't stabbed in the back - they were starving because of the British blockade.
The German soldiers with the menorah - one of those pictures that does the round of Twitter regularly - has a haunting quality for that reason. One wonders what happened to them and their families.
Perhaps this explains why Germany’s leaders of the 2010s were so confident about integrating migrants from the east in such large numbers, as they’d done it before. The difference is that Pashtuns are not Prussians; they are not ‘folk of our blood’.
Persilschein (Scheine is the plural) is very much a slang term for the denazification document. It’s obviously named after the famous brand of detergent. Get one of those, and it washes you clean!
Thanks for the recommendation. Picked it up via Audible. We Americans always felt like everything ended that day, yet the misery continued for many years.
Really interesting. I spent the whole morning following up links (Teufelsberg, Conrad Schumann, MV Wilhelm Gustloff etc.)
In the late 1970's I moved to Germany as a 19-year-old, mainly under the influence of Reginald Perrin: I wanted to break away from stifling 1970's English suburbia. It is only in retrospect that the German cities I lived in then (Cologne, Berlin) have become of historic interest to me. I didn't see them as historic places, only a strange place that I found myself in. It is only now that the coal merchants, whose product I shoveled into the inefficient and dirty Kachelofen in my Kreuzberg flat, seem like characters from some E.T.A. Hoffmann fairy story.
My love of Cold War spy novels has added an additional romantic glow of intrigue to my time in Berlin, though actually living there was the very geometry of ordinary city life. While there I probably yearned to be back among the hedgerow and semi-detached houses of suburban England. Some people are just never happy.
“The capitalist miracle of the post-war era had begun”. I think I read that in the Ladybird Book of 20th Century History. From 1945, the only way was up; the Germans are hard-working, inventive and they pull together; and most importantly the US government showered West Germany with money in order to build it up as a bulwark against Communism (and the occupying forces were numerous and relatively well-paid and spent much of their spare cash in the local area). Nothing miraculous about all that.
The demilitarization of Germany in the post 1945 period was also an important factor in the later German economic success.
The greatest scientists and engineers in the United States were designing hydrogen bombs, jet fighters and rockets. In West Germany (and Japan) people of similar calibre were not allowed to work in those areas and so spent their careers designing civilian vehicles and household appliances, which, unsurprisingly, turned out to be pretty good.
Good point. And, West Germany wasn’t what you’d call a typical capitalist country in other ways: several huge manufacturing firms, many medium-sized well-established regional businesses - often family run, high tax, restrictive guilds for every occupation with the slightest degree of skill, lots of rules, shops closed on Sundays, and lots of police. Marvellous place! Not like that anymore though…
As I read this post I thought of the problem in America as well as in Europe of mass migration in our day and of how disruptive it has been. In post-war Germany things we far different ir absorbing or reabsorbing Jews and others who had be imprisoned and worse by the Nazis, but at the same time perhaps we can learn from that horrible time.
The problems we are facing today are somewhat the same. Many of the migrants are from Arab nations under a similar soul crushing rule of radical Islamists, and in America's case from Mexico and other Central and South American nations being more unofficial rule of drug cartels and others, mainly Marxist dictators. Some of the illegal migrants have been mind-controlled by their rulers so that they have come into our countries to disrupt and create havoc, but many really do yearn to be free.
I don't pretend to know what we should do with them or to them, but we should at least understand what they have been subjected to in their origin countries. Not that we should not shield ourselves from being harmed, but punishing them for what had been done to them is not good for us and not for them either. One official response to freed Jews was creation of a country to which they could or must go, carved out of previous nations, good or bad, already in Palestine.
Look at what that resulted in. Relocated peoples unprepared to rule themselves thrust into as area stolen from the previous inhabitants. No wonder they clashed. And reactions on both sides were irrational. Eighty years later and rationality has not been restored, in many cases egged on by the countries that enabled the 'solution' in the first place. Today, the world faces the very real possibility of a third world war with even more destructive weapons and strategies to employ, threatening the existence of humanity all over the world. Are we not smart enough to come up with better alternatives?
Being a moral leader, or moral superpower, will make it hard to have sane discussions about controversial issues in the post-liberal world!
And, of course, excessive guilt cannot sustain a moral order for very long! People need a healthy and moderate sense of pride in their nation and culture!
Very nice post. I personally dislike the constant apologising for one's past. There are some people who are only ever happy when talking about themselves, whether that be positive or negative. They are especially comfortable about the latter since they feel they can go on and on without being accused of 'blowing their own trumpet'. They are signalling that they aren't narrow-mindedly tribal, which is the human default mode. Yet in the end it's just another, slightly more sophisticated form of vanity.
There is much good sense in your post, but your use of 'genocidal' to describe Israel's reaction to the Hamas attack of 7 October is misplaced. Genocode is the deliberate and systematic intent to exterminate a racial or national group (OED).
In 1948, the Arab population of Israel was 150,000; today it is around 2.1 million. Likewise the population of Gaza was about 63,500 in 1950; today it is about 823,000. Either Israel is astonishingly incompetent, a quality it is not noted for, or genocide really is not, and never has been its intention. Rather, for such intent one has only to look at the Hamas founding charter of 1988, which calls for the obliteration of Israel and the killing of the Jews.
The integration of the 'Vertriebene' from Eastern Germany certainly gets invoked these days by the Refugees Welcome crowd. I've heard Germans my age say things like "When my grandmother came to Frankfurt as a refugee in 1945 she was welcomed, so we owe the same welcome to migrants today ..." And of course it would be indelicate to respond that a trainload of Prussian women and a boatload of African men are not quite the same thing, where integrating into western Germany is concerned.
'Indelicate' but bloody obvious to all but the blind.
This was certainly a fascinating article to read. I have certainly read about the desolation and chaos of much of post-war Europe before but you have provided a lot of interesting details I don't believe I have seen before.
For example, I haven't read about how early many Western Germans were of the ethnic German and Prussian arrivals from the East and a wariness that they might be a permanent authoritarian influence in the future. The profound role of Prussia in founding the modern unified German nation and the fact that it was completely erased from the map after the war with the former residents becoming new leading citizens in the rest of the country makes one wonder what would happen if something similar happened elsewhere.
The notion that the Russians were less inclined to view ordinary Germans as complicit in evil would certainly have interesting effects downstream. I took an elective course showing how West and East Germany were very different in how they retrospectively looked at the atrocities of Nazism. The East Germans were told that all previous conflicts were forgotten and forgiven as now we have socialism. West Germans, particularly starting in the 1960s, contrasty engaged in massive soul searching about previous atrocities.
"In November 1945 three American soldiers went to a football stadium in uniform and no one bothered them." Sadly I think George Bush thought that it would be like this in Iraq after the Iraq war.
"These eastern Jews actually looked like the alien caricatures Nazi propaganda had bombarded them with, dressed in oriental clothes from the shtetl, totally unlike the assimilated German Jews they had grown up with. "
That is the weird thing about the holocaust German Jews were integrated and actually paid a vital role in WWI - they were a great benefit.
I do wonder if Hitler had not been in hospital at the end of WWI he might have realised that they weren't stabbed in the back - they were starving because of the British blockade.
The German soldiers with the menorah - one of those pictures that does the round of Twitter regularly - has a haunting quality for that reason. One wonders what happened to them and their families.
Fascinating piece Ed, not a story I knew.
Perhaps this explains why Germany’s leaders of the 2010s were so confident about integrating migrants from the east in such large numbers, as they’d done it before. The difference is that Pashtuns are not Prussians; they are not ‘folk of our blood’.
How many people had Pastun mistresses?
Persilschein (Scheine is the plural) is very much a slang term for the denazification document. It’s obviously named after the famous brand of detergent. Get one of those, and it washes you clean!
aha!
Thanks for the recommendation. Picked it up via Audible. We Americans always felt like everything ended that day, yet the misery continued for many years.
Enjoy! It's a great read.
Really interesting. I spent the whole morning following up links (Teufelsberg, Conrad Schumann, MV Wilhelm Gustloff etc.)
In the late 1970's I moved to Germany as a 19-year-old, mainly under the influence of Reginald Perrin: I wanted to break away from stifling 1970's English suburbia. It is only in retrospect that the German cities I lived in then (Cologne, Berlin) have become of historic interest to me. I didn't see them as historic places, only a strange place that I found myself in. It is only now that the coal merchants, whose product I shoveled into the inefficient and dirty Kachelofen in my Kreuzberg flat, seem like characters from some E.T.A. Hoffmann fairy story.
My love of Cold War spy novels has added an additional romantic glow of intrigue to my time in Berlin, though actually living there was the very geometry of ordinary city life. While there I probably yearned to be back among the hedgerow and semi-detached houses of suburban England. Some people are just never happy.
“The capitalist miracle of the post-war era had begun”. I think I read that in the Ladybird Book of 20th Century History. From 1945, the only way was up; the Germans are hard-working, inventive and they pull together; and most importantly the US government showered West Germany with money in order to build it up as a bulwark against Communism (and the occupying forces were numerous and relatively well-paid and spent much of their spare cash in the local area). Nothing miraculous about all that.
I don't know about that - aid money hasn't been that successful in making other countries work.
They created a new currency, among other things!
The demilitarization of Germany in the post 1945 period was also an important factor in the later German economic success.
The greatest scientists and engineers in the United States were designing hydrogen bombs, jet fighters and rockets. In West Germany (and Japan) people of similar calibre were not allowed to work in those areas and so spent their careers designing civilian vehicles and household appliances, which, unsurprisingly, turned out to be pretty good.
Good point. And, West Germany wasn’t what you’d call a typical capitalist country in other ways: several huge manufacturing firms, many medium-sized well-established regional businesses - often family run, high tax, restrictive guilds for every occupation with the slightest degree of skill, lots of rules, shops closed on Sundays, and lots of police. Marvellous place! Not like that anymore though…
I had started Orderly and Humane about a year ago but struggled with it. I think I’ll now try Aftermath.
As I read this post I thought of the problem in America as well as in Europe of mass migration in our day and of how disruptive it has been. In post-war Germany things we far different ir absorbing or reabsorbing Jews and others who had be imprisoned and worse by the Nazis, but at the same time perhaps we can learn from that horrible time.
The problems we are facing today are somewhat the same. Many of the migrants are from Arab nations under a similar soul crushing rule of radical Islamists, and in America's case from Mexico and other Central and South American nations being more unofficial rule of drug cartels and others, mainly Marxist dictators. Some of the illegal migrants have been mind-controlled by their rulers so that they have come into our countries to disrupt and create havoc, but many really do yearn to be free.
I don't pretend to know what we should do with them or to them, but we should at least understand what they have been subjected to in their origin countries. Not that we should not shield ourselves from being harmed, but punishing them for what had been done to them is not good for us and not for them either. One official response to freed Jews was creation of a country to which they could or must go, carved out of previous nations, good or bad, already in Palestine.
Look at what that resulted in. Relocated peoples unprepared to rule themselves thrust into as area stolen from the previous inhabitants. No wonder they clashed. And reactions on both sides were irrational. Eighty years later and rationality has not been restored, in many cases egged on by the countries that enabled the 'solution' in the first place. Today, the world faces the very real possibility of a third world war with even more destructive weapons and strategies to employ, threatening the existence of humanity all over the world. Are we not smart enough to come up with better alternatives?
One gets the impression that many take pleasure in guilt, something a few Germans have confirmed. it's become a way of being a moral leader
Being a moral leader, or moral superpower, will make it hard to have sane discussions about controversial issues in the post-liberal world!
And, of course, excessive guilt cannot sustain a moral order for very long! People need a healthy and moderate sense of pride in their nation and culture!
Very nice post. I personally dislike the constant apologising for one's past. There are some people who are only ever happy when talking about themselves, whether that be positive or negative. They are especially comfortable about the latter since they feel they can go on and on without being accused of 'blowing their own trumpet'. They are signalling that they aren't narrow-mindedly tribal, which is the human default mode. Yet in the end it's just another, slightly more sophisticated form of vanity.
There is much good sense in your post, but your use of 'genocidal' to describe Israel's reaction to the Hamas attack of 7 October is misplaced. Genocode is the deliberate and systematic intent to exterminate a racial or national group (OED).
In 1948, the Arab population of Israel was 150,000; today it is around 2.1 million. Likewise the population of Gaza was about 63,500 in 1950; today it is about 823,000. Either Israel is astonishingly incompetent, a quality it is not noted for, or genocide really is not, and never has been its intention. Rather, for such intent one has only to look at the Hamas founding charter of 1988, which calls for the obliteration of Israel and the killing of the Jews.
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/21st_century/hamas.asp
Thank you David.